Bell Hooks Communion Quotes

Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.

The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.

Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?

Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.

Nothing indicts female allegiance to patriarchy more than the willingness to behave as though the problems created by cultural investment in sexist thinking about the nature of male and female roles can be solved by women's working harder.

I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.

I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go.

For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community.

The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice. Men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love. If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love.

Heightened awareness often gives the illusion that a problem is lessening. This is most often not the case. It may mean simply that a problem has become so widespread it can no longer remain hidden or be ignored.

Women have greater freedom than ever before, and yet it is not clear whether that freedom has given us greater access to true love. It is not clear how that freedom has changed the nature of romance and partnerships.

And when we love, we know love will last. Significantly, we know, having learned through much trial and error, that true love begins with self-love. And that time and time again our search for love brings us back to the place where we started, back to our own heart's mirror, where we can look upon our female selves with love and be renewed.

Women talk about love. From girlhood on, we learn that conversations about love are a gendered narrative, a female subject...Femaleness in patriarchal culture marks us from the very beginning as unworthy or not as worthy, and it should come as no surprise that we learn to worry most as girls, as women, about whether we are worthy of love.

Men do not wound women only when they act violently and abusively. They wound us when they fail to protect our freedom in every aspect of our daily lives

The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.

Romance is different when two people approach each other from the space of knowledge rather than absolute mystery. No matter how well we get to know someone else, there is always a realm of mystery. Old ideas about romantic love taught females and males to believe that erotic tension depended on the absence of communication and understanding. This misinformation about the nature of love has helped to further the politics of domination, particularly male domination of women. Without knowing one other, we can never experience intimacy.

How can any girl sustain the belief that she is loved, truly loved, when all around her she sees that femaleness is despised? Unable to change the fact of femaleness, she strives to make herself over, to become someone worthy of love.

Significantly, romantic friendships can coexist with the fact of partners' marrying because their reason for being is not to replace marriage but to open the possibility of sustained, committed true love existing among friends, and not just same-sex friends. No matter that our chosen relationship commitments change. Those of us who have long-term romantic friendships, some that have lasted longer than any of our marriages or partnerships, do not fear that these commitments will falter if we create primary bonds.

The fact that men use emotional withholding as a weapon of psychological terrorism is never discussed.

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.

Let's not kid ourselves, we find mutual love only when we know how to love. And the best place to start practicing the art of love is with the self--that body, mind, heart, and soul that we can most know and change. The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourselves. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin....rather than embracing faulty thinking that encourages us to believe that females are inherently loving, we make the choice to become loving. Choosing love, we affirm our agency, our commitment to personal growth, our emotional openness.

When men are able to assume an equal role with women as caregivers, it becomes most evident that they can nurture as well as women.

I would like heterosexual women to be as actively curious about how and why and when they became heterosexual as I have been about how and why and when I became a Lesbian.

Not only do we want to rescue our mothers but also we want to change our destiny so we will never suffer the way they did or do.

Uniting the search for love with the quest to be free was the crucial step. Searching for love, I found the path to freedom. Learning how to be free was the first step in learning to know love.

For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don’t have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community

Most feminist groups began with women talking about how we saw ourselves and other women, how we acted. We openly confessed our fears and hatred of other women. We talked about how to combat jealousy, the politics of envy, and so on.

Men did care enough to struggle with our demands. And some cared enough to convert to feminist thinking and to change. But only a very, very few loved us – loved us all the way. And that meant respecting our sexual rights. To this day I believe that feminist debate about love and sexuality ended precisely because straight women did not want to face the reality that it was highly unlikely in patriarchal society that a majority of men would wholeheartedly embrace women’s right to say no in the bedroom. Since the vast majority of heterosexual women, even those involved in radical feminist movement, were not willing to say no when they did not want to perform sexually for the fear of upsetting or alienating their mate, no significant group of men ever had to rise to the occasion. While it became more acceptable to say no now and then, it was not acceptable to say no for any significant amount of time. An individual woman in a primary relationship with a man could not say no, because she feared there was always another woman in the background who could take her place, a woman who would never say no.

There is no love without justice.

The greatest freedom I have now is that I no longer believe that anyone else can save my life. --Erica Jong, quoted by bell hooks in Communion The Female Search for Love

The tragic irony here is that patriarchal thinking has socialized males to believe that their manhood is affirmed when they are emotionally withholding.

What we were was emotionally needy, desperate for the recognition (whether from male or female partners) that would prove our worth, our value, our right to be alive on the planet, and we were willing to do anything to get it. As females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing—yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves.

To this day I believe that feminist debate about love and sexuality ended precisely because straight women did not want to face the reality that it was highly unlikely in patriarchal society that a majority of men would whole-heartedly embrace women’s right to say no in the bedroom.

I am grateful that the images of masculinity as a child were varied. I knew that lots of men were “macho” like my dad, but I also knew there were men like my granddad— calm, gentle, and kind. These diverse images shaped my perspective. In my childhood there were men who were not ashamed to express their love of God openly and to shed ecstatic tears. These men were renegades, rebelling against the patriarchal norm. And they were the men I was destined to love, the sensitive, soulful, shy men who were looked down upon by the patriarchy. The men who inhabited my dreams were men of feeling.

Ode to the Beloved’s Hips" Bells are they—shaped on the eighth day—silvered percussion in the morning—are the morning. Swing switch sway. Hold the day away a little longer, a little slower, a little easy. Call to me— I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock right now—so to them I come—struck-dumb chime-blind, tolling with a throat full of Hosanna. How many hours bowed against this Infinity of Blessed Trinity? Communion of Pelvis, Sacrum, Femur. My mouth—terrible angel, ever-lasting novena, ecstatic devourer. O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped the amber—fast honey—from their openness— Ah Muzen Cab’s hidden Temple of Tulúm—licked smooth the sticky of her hip—heat-thrummed ossa coxae. Lambent slave to ilium and ischium—I never tire to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet- dripped comb—hot hexagonal hole—dark diamond— to its nectar-dervished queen. Meanad tongue— come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips, I am—strummed-song and succubus. They are the sign: hip. And the cosign: a great book— the body’s Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel. Alleluias, Ave Marías, madre mías, ay yay yays, Ay Dios míos, and hip-hip-hooray. Cult of Coccyx. Culto de cadera. Oracle of Orgasm. Rorschach’s riddle: What do I see? Hips: Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone. Transubstantiation bone—hips of bread, wine-whet thighs. Say the word and healed I shall be: Bone butterfly. Bone wings. Bone Ferris wheel. Bone basin bone throne bone lamp. Apparition in the bone grotto—6th mystery— slick rosary bead—Déme la gracia of a decade in this garden of carmine flower. Exile me to the enormous orchard of Alcinous—spiced fruit, laden-tree—Imparadise me. Because, God, I am guilty. I am sin-frenzied and full of teeth for pear upon apple upon fig. More than all that are your hips. They are a city. They are Kingdom— Troy, the hollowed horse, an army of desire— thirty soldiers in the belly, two in the mouth. Beloved, your hips are the war. At night your legs, love, are boulevards leading me beggared and hungry to your candy house, your baroque mansion. Even when I am late and the tables have been cleared, in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake. O, constellation of pelvic glide—every curve, a luster, a star. More infinite still, your hips are kosmic, are universe—galactic carousel of burning comets and Big Big Bangs. Millennium Falcon, let me be your Solo. O, hot planet, let me circumambulate. O, spiral galaxy, I am coming for your dark matter. Along las calles de tus muslos I wander— follow the parade of pulse like a drum line— descend into your Plaza del Toros— hands throbbing Miura bulls, dark Isleros. Your arched hips—ay, mi torera. Down the long corridor, your wet walls lead me like a traje de luces—all glitter, glowed. I am the animal born to rush your rich red muletas—each breath, each sigh, each groan, a hooked horn of want. My mouth at your inner thigh—here I must enter you—mi pobre Manolete—press and part you like a wound— make the crowd pounding in the grandstand of your iliac crest rise up in you and cheer.

The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love. Since loving lets us let go of so much fear, it also guides our grief. When we lose someone we love, we can grieve without shame. Given that commitment is an important aspect of love, we who love know we must sustain ties in life and death. Our mourning, our letting ourselves grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion. Knowing

Feminist silence about love reflects a collective sorrow about our powerlessness to free all men from the hold patriarchy has on their minds and hearts. It reflects our shock at male betrayal. It has not been that difficult to show women the ways in which their continued allegiance to patriarchal thinking hurts them and other women. It has been hard to inspire them to give up that allegiance when it provides them common ground on which to meet and bond with men.

I wanted to find my own identity and be autonomous at the same time that I wanted to find a mate who would rescue me, who would provide and protect. Of course I wanted to be able to provide for myself. Just in case that did not happen, I wanted the luxury of backup. I was not a free spirit. I wanted to blend old-fashioned values learned at home—which cautioned me to be conservative, take care, and be responsible—with New Age spirituality and radical ideas of freedom and choice. No matter how much I might have longed to free myself from a sense of responsibility to the collective good, to family and community, I was psychically bound. I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go. I was, like generations of women before me, split, torn between two competing identities—the longing to be the liberated, independent, sexually free woman and the desire to settle down and be domesticated.

Extolling the transformative power of love in his essay “Love and Need,” Merton writes: “Love is, in fact an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life. . . . Life curves upward to a peak of intensity, a high point of value and meaning, at which all its latent creative possibility go into action and the person transcends himself or herself in encounter, response, and communion with another. It is for this that we came into the world—this communion and self-transcendence. We do not become fully human until we give ourselves to each other in love.” The teachings about love offered by Fromm, King, and Merton differ from much of today’s writing. There is always an emphasis in their work on love as an active force that should lead us into greater communion with the world. In their work, loving practice is not aimed at simply giving an individual greater life satisfaction; it is extolled as the primary way we end domination and oppression. This important politicization of love is often absent from today’s writing.

Life without communion in love with others would be less fulfilling no matter the extend of one's self-love.

In A Queer Geography Frank Browning makes the useful distinction between gay identity politics, which often closes down connection, and a commitment to eros and eroticism that widens connections: By erotic, I mean all the powerful attractions we might have: for mentoring and being mentored, for unrealizable flirtation, for intellectual tripping, for sweaty mateship at play or at work, for spiritual ecstasy, for being held in silent grief, for explosive rage at a common enemy, for the sublime love of friendship. All or none of these ways of loving might be connected to the fact that I usually have sex with men because all of these loves can and do happen with both men and women in my life. Patriarchy has sought to repress and tame erotic passion precisely because of its power to draw us into greater and greater communion with ourselves, with those we know most intimately, and with the stranger.

the deepest inner conflicts of smart girls were the fear of our bodies’ betraying us, the depression suffered from lack of emotional support, and the reality of there being nowhere to turn.

Each one of my partners supported my intellectual and creative work in ways that I still appreciate and value, whereas the lack of mature emotional interaction helped retard my emotional growth.

The tragic irony here is that patriarchal thinking has socialized males to believe that their manhood is affirmed

Elizabeth Watson urges women in midlife to speak out: “Stand up for what you believe. Go back to that teenage person you were, who wanted something very badly, then go out and get it. This is a time in your life when there’s nothing and no one standing in your way.” After years of pleasing others or being self-effacing, women in midlife often begin to do the work of self-critique, an evaluation that might have been more difficult or threatening at a younger age.

Everything is bearable when there is love. My wish is that you try to give more people more love. The only thing that lives forever is love.” The female search for love is what life should be all about.

Somehow, as we made our entrance into the realm of young womanhood, we began to lose power. Fascinating research on girlhood is happening these days. It confirms that young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.

An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self-- a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us.

How can a poem make a difference? How can a tree make a difference? Perhaps the answer to those questions is that poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone. The Kentucky writer bell hooks once wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” Going to the woods, or simply noticing the small defiant ways nature is thriving all around me on a daily basis, helps me feel that communion. And poems, like the poems that I’ve collected here for this anthology, help me feel that sense of communion too.

Without knowing one another, we can never experience intimacy.

An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self - a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us

friendships with women have never been overtly sexual, but a good many of them have been what bell hooks in her book Communion: The Female Search for Love called romantic, in the soul-inspiring way that someone being thoughtful about loving you and showing up for you is romantic.

As females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing–yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves.

More than ever before, women talk about the difficulties of being powerful ina a world that has changed a lot but that still remains patriarchal. Hence we have enormous freedom in a world that is not yet fully accepting of our freedom

Self-proclaimed feminist thinkers have colluded with the patriarchal pornographic imagination's use of mass media to represent the sexual resubordination of women by men as cute, playful, and harmless ... we are bombarded with images suggesting that male sexual domination of women in no way threatens female autonomy or independence. In actuality, male domination of females in the sexual arena ... is a constant reminder that females are not free, that we have not attained full equal rights or equity.

If feminists had continued to talk about love, then we would have needed to speak about the extreme lovelessness that is at the heart of domination. ... patriarchy, like any colonizing system, does not create the context for men and women to love each other ... genuine love between females and males could only emerge in a context where the sexes would come together to challenge and change patriarchal thought.

Now we know that the most feminist action any female can take on her behalf is doing the work of creating positive self-esteem, the foundation of self-love. For it is that grounding that prepares us to love fully and well. Whether we do the work of being an astronaut, a lawyer, or a garbage collector, or whether we happily choose to be self-employed or a stay-at-home homemaker, wise women know that self-love will determine the degree to which we will feel fulfilled by any of these task.

We learn in childhood that the roots of love lie outside our capabilities, that to know love we must be loved by others. For as females in patriarchal culture, we cannot determine our self-worth. Our value, our worth, and whether or not we can be loved are always determined by someone else. Deprived of the means to generate self-love, we look to others to render us lovable; we long for love and we search.

Socialized in the false assumption that we will find love in the place where femaleness is deemed unworthy and consistently devalued, we learn early to pretend that love matters more than anything, when in actuality we know that what matters most, even in the wake of feminist movement, is patriarchal approval. From birth on, most females live in fear that we will be abandoned, that if we step outside the approved circle, we will not be loved.

Loving that girl within has healed the woundedness that often led us to search for love in all the wrong places. Midlife for many of us has been the fabulous moment of pause where we begin to contemplate the true meaning of love in our lives. We begin to see clearly how much love matters, not the old patriarchal versions of “love” but a deeper understanding of love as a transformational force demanding of each individual accountability and responsibility for nurturing our spiritual growth.

I was torn between my desire to follow the dictates of my inner self and my distrust of that self.

that to choose to be smart would alienate men; that to be “too smart” would make a woman crazy.

we passionately debated the question of whether or not it was possible for women to achieve feminist liberation in the context of intimate relationships with patriarchal men.

Whether straight or gay, promiscuous or celibate, we were not sure how to love ourselves as free women or how to create a culture where we could be loved. We had to find a way to redefine our notion of women’s liberation so it would include our right to love and be loved.

Healing is an act of communion

When I would talk about my yearning for a loving partner, people told me over and over that I did not need anyone else. They would say I did not need a companion and/or a circle of loved ones to feel complete, that I should be complete inside myself. While it is definitely true that inner contentedness and a sense of fulfillment can be there whether or not we commune in love with others, it is equally meaningful to give voice to that longing for communion. Life without communion in love with others would be less fulfilling no matter the extent of one's self-love.

Much as I enjoy popular New Age commentary on love, I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community. Packaged as a commodity, spirituality becomes no different from an exercise program. While it may leave the consumer feeling better about his or her life, its power to enhance our communion with ourselves and others in a sustained way is inhibited. Commenting on the value of an engaged life in The Active Life: Wisdom for Work, Creativity, and Caring, Parker Palmer writes: “To be fully alive is to act. ... I understand action to be any way that we can co-create reality with other beings and the Spirit. . . . Action, like a sacrament, is the visible form of an invisible spirit, an outward manifestation of an inward power. But as we act, we not only express what is in us and help give shape to the world; we also receive what is outside us, and reshape out inner selves.” A commitment to a spiritual life requires us to do more than read a good book or go on a restful retreat. It requires conscious practice, a willingness to unite the way we think with the way we act.

It is not for strategic reasons alone that gathering together has been at the heart of every movement for social change. . . . These meetings were in themselves the realizations of a desire that is at the core of human imaginings, the desire to locate ourselves in community, to make our survival a shared effort, to experience a palpable reverence in our connections with each other and the earth that sustains us.

Giving brings us into communion with everyone. It is one way for us to understand that there is truly enough of everything for everybody.

equally meaningful to give voice to that longing for communion.

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” — bell hooks